


just a little bit more than the law will allow

by rippergiles



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 15.07, 15x07, Canonical Character Death, Episode Related, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, canon compliant if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:41:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21995422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rippergiles/pseuds/rippergiles
Summary: Seeing Lee again brings back memories for Dean.
Relationships: Lee Webb/Dean Winchester, Leo Webb/Dean Winchester
Comments: 17
Kudos: 65





	just a little bit more than the law will allow

**Author's Note:**

> “Last Call” was written by Jeremy Adams.  
> The flashbacks are in the order they made narrative sense to me, not necessarily the order they occurred. Hopefully no one gets too caught up in the logistics :)  
> Beta read by [chitaqua](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chitaqua)\- thank you for everything!

_Then  
  
_

“He’s gonna help us with some cases while Sammy is away,” Dean’s dad was saying. A new face had joined their table at the roadhouse, one with bright eyes and hair that would probably catch the light if you ever saw him during the day. Truth be told, he did look like he’d be more at home in a catalog than on a hunt.

“Kind of a pretty boy, don’t you think?” Dean jibed, calling out what he was sure his father was thinking.

“They say the same about you,” John said gruffly. “You still manage to be a decent hunter.”

The _decent_ felt like an intentional jab, one that killed Dean’s grin, turning his lips into a thin line. The man looked between the two of them, then extended a hand.

“Lee Webb.”

Dean took it, gripping and shaking harder than he would have a minute before.

  
  
  
_Now_  
  


Dean’s breath caught as he saw him at the bar, stage lights flashing, music blasting, looking every bit the rock star they’d both joked about becoming. Lee had a few more pounds around the middle, a few more wrinkles around the eyes. But hell, Dean knew he wasn’t free of blemishes from the last decade and a half himself. Dean had barely approached him before they pulled each other into a tight hug, Lee clapping his back while already calling for a round of beers.  
  
They’d only just settled at the bar when Lee asked about John, catching Dean off guard. He hadn’t had to tell anyone about his father in years— by this point they all already knew, or were dead themselves.

“He died,” Dean said, and watched Lee’s smile fall. He tried to play it off, casually remarking that he’d gone down fighting as if that was any consolation when Dean could see his own end approaching much the same. He didn’t have to mention the circumstances of the last time any of them had seen each other; he could feel the unspoken memory in the air between them.

“Sorry, man,” was all Lee could say.

“I appreciate that.”

A grin surfaced on Lee’s face again. “You remember that time he caught us wasted on a hunt?”

Huh. Unspoken no more, then. Dean nodded, ignoring the way his heart sped up at the question.

“He was so mad,” Lee laughed. “I thought he was gonna have an aneurysm.”

Dean forced a chuckle, still stiff in his interactions and unsure of where they stood. He could’ve had something with Lee, once upon a time, but there was always something holding him back, the fear at the back of his mind. By the time he’d finally begun to put that behind him, well…

The last few weeks without Cas entered his mind, all strained conversations and stubborn silence. The common denominator was clear— himself. He knew he couldn’t fight this war on multiple fronts. He could drop his guard with Lee. This was low stakes, just another night of fun. Like old times.  
  
“Yeah, but I’ll tell you what,” Dean said. “He always liked you. He said he’d never seen anybody better in a fight. That is high praise coming from my old man.”

He left off the part about how that had been because his father was criticizing Dean’s fighting after a hunt, suggesting that he should have kept Lee around instead of him.

“To John Winchester,” Lee said as he picked up his beer. They clinked bottles as Dean pressed his lips together.

“Thank you.” Dean drank, letting himself relish the taste. “You know, I don’t think I’ve seen you since Sammy was in college. Hell, I thought you were—”

“Dead?”

“Well, I mean, that’s usually how this ends, isn’t it?”

Lee paused, looking down at his bottle. “Yeah.”

It was a somber truth they both knew but had rarely spoken before. Silence stretched between them— one second, two seconds, three.

“You remember that cult thing we did in Arizona?” Lee asked.

“Oh yeah, I remember that.”

“I did one more case after that, and decided this wasn’t the life for me anymore. I scrounged up what I could, and bought this joint.” Lee made a little cheering motion with his hands. “Living the dream.” 

“Let me ask you something,” Dean said, biting his lip. “You ever regret it...walking away?”

“Not once.”  
  
  
  


_Then  
  
_

“Listen up, boys, this is real music,” John said, revving the Impala’s engine as Dean and Lee laughed and sang along to the Dukes of Hazzard theme. Lee drummed on Dean’s thigh while Dean played air guitar, falling together in the backseat.  
  
“ _Makin’ their waaaayyyy the only way they know how…_ ”

Since his teenage years, Dean usually took shotgun while his father drove, but when Lee was around, he got to play hooligan again, and his dad usually let him. He caught his dad glancing at them in the rearview mirror and shaking his head, but he spotted a rare grin on John Winchester’s face.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
The ride home from the hunt was a stark contrast, silence everywhere except the engine’s rumble. Dean was in the passenger seat, balling his fists so tightly that his fingernails dug into his palm. He took a single glance in the mirror, and Lee’s empty, horrified eyes kept him staring straight ahead at the road until they parked at the motel.

John was out first, the keys barely out of the ignition before he’d disappeared into his room. Dean got out slowly, swinging one leg onto the pavement at a time. Once he stood up, Lee still hadn’t moved from the backseat. Dean leaned down into the car.

“You coming?”

Lee’s eyes stayed fixed ahead of him. “I guess.”

Dean sighed, closing his door and circling the car to open Lee’s door. “Come on, man.”

Lee nearly stumbled as he exited the car, but Dean caught him by the elbow and steadied him. 

“Listen, Lee,” he began, with no plan for finishing that sentence. Lee nodded to nothing in particular and trudged toward the room they were sharing. He pulled out a room key with shaking hands, fumbling the door open and walking inside, leaving it ajar for Dean to follow.

Once inside, Lee stood still in the middle of the room, again looking into the distance at nothing in particular.

“Buddy,” Dean tried again. “I know that was fucked. We didn’t know what we were heading into. But that’s part of the job sometimes.”

Lee let out a shuddering breath, then gulped. “We did what we could,” he whispered.

“That’s right,” Dean told him. “Now what do you say you take a hot shower, get some of the grime off. You’ll feel better.”

Lee nodded again, but didn’t move. Dean could see this was going to be an effort.

“Do you want me to help you?”

Lee didn’t respond, so Dean made a judgment call and moved in to guide him into the bathroom. Dean leaned past him into the shower and turned the water on, shifting the tap to hot. 

“I hope you can take your own clothes off?”

A little recognition seemed to come back to Lee’s face then as he nodded once more, more decisively this time.

“Good. I’m gonna wash up in the sink right outside, so just say something if you need me, okay?”

Dean gripped him by the shoulder in what he hoped was a reassuring way, then backed out of the bathroom and left the door open just a crack. He peeled his own t-shirt off and took a glance at himself in the mirror. A bruise was forming over his ribs where one of the near-rabid cult members had kicked him, knocking the wind out. A shock of blood was splashed across his forehead, and more covered his knuckles. Those were his own doing.  
  
Flashes of the night’s failures entered his mind as he scrubbed his hands, then his face, listening for any sign of Lee doing the same. The grime he felt beneath his skin would take much longer to scrub away, but once his skin was more or less clean, he knocked on the bathroom door and poked his head in.

“You doing okay?”

Lee grunted from behind the shower curtain. Dean suspected he’d stood there under the water doing nothing for the past several minutes. He knew from experience there was only one way to handle nights like these.

“Look, I know you feel like shit,” Dean sighed. “I’ve been on bad hunts before, and it never gets easier. But you gotta snap out of it. Come on out and we’re going to go find a bar. First round’s on me.”

“A bar?” Lee asked, finally starting to sound like a person rather than the hollowed-out husk of one.  
  
Dean smiled. “We went out and found trouble. Now we dare trouble to come find us.”  
  
  
  
  
  
_Now_ _  
_  
  
“I never got a standing ovation before.”  
  
Lee squeezed his shoulder. “Feels pretty good, doesn’t it?”

Dean’s blood was racing through his veins as his heart thundered in his ears, staring out at the small but spirited crowd. Emboldened by the booze, he and Lee had shared a mic despite the extras on stage, and stood too close to one another as they sang a song he hadn’t thought about in years. His ass still stung a little where Lee slapped it, careless but with a grin that made Dean nostalgic.  
  
Cries of distress interrupted his daze, a girl swatting men away on either side who continued to crowd around her.

“Road House rules?” Dean asked, not taking his eyes off the girl.

Lee answered without hesitation. “Road House rules.”

They took long strides toward the scuffle. A muscular, balding man pushed the blonde back against the window, laughing cruelly as she shrieked at him.

“Hey, hey!” Dean clapped the offender on the shoulder. “I think you fellas have had enough.”

The fucker gave him a shit-eating grin worthy of a punch then and there. “Nah, I think we’ll stay a while.”

Dean and Lee looked to each other and their eyes met in understanding. Lee hoisted one body up, crashing it through a window, while Dean swung his charge through the double doors and onto the front steps. Here they were, fighting back to back again, only with rowdy bargoers instead of vamps or cultists. Dean saw how easy this life could be to get used to.

“Still got it” Lee chuckled, raising his fist for Dean’s to meet it. His cheeks hurt from smiling. He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.

  
  
  
_  
_ _Then_ _  
_ _  
_  
Bottles and glasses covered the table, an impressive number even between the four of them. Dean and Lee had twin blondes between them, practically in their laps at this point, all giggles and cocked eyebrows under the bleached hair.

“Ladies,” Lee began. “Whaddya say we make our way to the afterparty?” 

Another round of giggles. “We can’t go yet,” Diane or Darla said. “Our sister is supposed to meet us here.”

Dean’s stomach did a backflip. “Your—” He cleared his throat. “There’s another one?”  
  
  


* * *

  
Five pairs of eyes exchanged countless prolonged glances, five mouths downed even more drinks as the night wore on. Inhibitions lowered as a pleasant looseness took over Dean’s brain. Smiles came easier, now. It had been too long since he was able to kick back with someone like this, someone who wasn’t his father or brother. The girls were a nice bonus. It was only a matter of time before Dean and Lee were half carrying them, and each other, back to their room.  
  
  


* * *

Limbs hung off the too-small beds, all the sounds of sloppy, drunken, crowded sex surrounding them. Dean glanced at Lee over the backsides of their respective conquests, trying to focus on something else to stave off his building orgasm. Lee bit his lip around a grin, threw a lethal wink at Dean, and began thrusting harder into his current triplet. Dean was distressed to find himself hurtling toward climax now, deep inside the blonde woman but with eyes still fixed on Lee’s.  
  
  
  
  
  
_Now_

  
Dean blinked hard, trying to bring the room into focus. Restraints bound him to a chair, and an IV line extended ahead of him to a door with a tiny window near the top, cross-hatched bars covering it. The last thing Dean remembered was hitting the junkyard, then…

The body. A gun to his back. _Lee_.  
  
“You awake, buddy?”

Dean couldn’t even be angry. He was just tired. So, so tired. “The hell you doing, man?” 

“You had to hit the junkyard, didn’t you?” Lee almost sounded remorseful.  
  
  


* * *

  
  
He reached down, releasing the clamp on the IV. Blood began to flow freely from Dean’s arm, up the tube and toward the window where he’d seen the beast.

“Now, it takes a while to drain a man, but listen to me. Don’t worry about it, alright? Don’t worry, because once you lose a couple pints, you just fall asleep, and it’ll be over.”

Dean could tell he was meant to see this as a mercy.

Lee clapped him once more on the shoulder as he turned to leave.

“Lee.”

The man he once knew stopped. “This is not how I wanted this to go, Dean.”  
  
  
  
  


_Then_ _  
  
_

Dean laughed, throwing his head back at Lee flailing his arms, reenacting, not for the first time, a kill he’d made earlier that evening. The adrenaline from their hunt was waning by now, but Lee’s enthusiasm re-ignited it. Dean’s heart picked up speed as he remembered them back-to-back, surrounded by vamps, slashing and slicing and sending heads flying in every direction. 

Keyed up and with nothing to do, they’d procured booze from a local shop, hoping the aging cashier didn’t look too closely at the non-matching names on their stolen credit cards and fake IDs. Shuffling back out to Lee’s beat-up truck, they put the paper bags between them and peeled out of the parking lot. 

“Wanna take these back to the motel?” Lee asked.

Dean hesitated. His old man was no stranger to drinking. Hell, Dean would have drunk around him more often if he wasn’t usually the one making sure his dad didn’t drive, didn’t pass out somewhere he shouldn’t, didn’t choke on his own vomit in the middle of the night.

“Nah,” he said. “Pull off somewhere close to it, and we can walk back when we feel like it.”

Despite the small pile of bagged bottles on the seat, their knees managed to knock together as they hugged tight curves, but neither of them made much effort to avoid the contact. Lee cranked the radio up and Zeppelin filled the truck’s cab, sending them both into half-performing, half-laughing their way through _Ramble On_ as Lee pulled the truck off the road and into a field.

Within minutes of parking, the motel’s lit sign flickering in the distance, they’d hoisted themselves into the truck bed and made a dent in the first bottle. They passed it between each other as they continued to recount the hunt. Whiskey was on their breath and in their blood, making their skin perspire and tingle in the night air as a gentle wind whispered through the field. The silences that fell between them became longer as they ran out of memories to whoop and laugh about. The prolonged glances between them, the lingering brushes of their skin as they passed the bottle became too frequent to write off as accidental.

It wasn’t a surprise when Lee leaned over and kissed him. But Dean pulled away, because this isn’t what they did, goddammit. He wasn’t gay. Hell, Lee wasn’t either, judging by what Dean had seen with the triplets. He held Lee a few inches away, frozen, breathing heavily, noticing rings of color in his eyes even in the dim light. Lee moved in again and Dean let him this time, Lee’s longer hair falling between their faces as he swung a leg and moved onto Dean’s lap.  
  
Lee kissed him hard, pulling at his lower lip with his teeth, grinding against Dean as he did so. Dean’s mouth opened and their tongues moved to meet each other, soft grunts escaping unexpectedly as Lee’s hand reached between them to undo Dean’s belt and zipper. He was half-hard already, despite years of ingrained hang-ups screaming in his head that this was wrong. The screams died down to pathetic protestations as Lee wrapped a hand around him, jacking him a few times until half-hard had become painfully so.  
  
Dean, whose arms had stayed frozen at his sides so far, tentatively rose a hand and threaded it into Lee’s hair. Lee smirked against his neck, where he was sucking at a place below Dean’s jaw, and Dean gave a hard tug in response, eliciting a laugh.

“Knew you had it in you, boy.”

Dean used his other hand to undo Lee’s pants, then slid it around to Lee’s back and down into his waistband, digging fingers into the meat of his ass and pulling their groins closer together. Lee groaned into Dean’s mouth as he continued to stroke him. Dean’s breathing became too heavy to give more than the lowest-effort open-mouth kisses as tension coiled in his cut, threatening release as Lee rubbed his thumb over the head. He moaned, closing his eyes tight as he tried to postpone the inevitable.

Neither of them noticed the crunch of gravel, the swinging beam of a flashlight, until John Winchester’s voice was loud in their ears, angry and terrifying.  
  
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” John boomed, shoving Lee off of Dean and dragging his son out of the truck bed, not seeming to care when Dean crumpled to the ground instead of landing upright.

Hot shame filled Dean’s gut as he pulled himself up and tried to zip up his pants and cover the bulge inside. His dad was already shoving him along, back toward the motel where the three of them were supposed to be sleeping tonight.

“Hey!” Lee called after them, sliding out of the truck bed and taking a few steps before John rounded on him.

“Lee, I like you,” he said, his breathing carefully measured, the anger barely contained. “You’re good on a hunt. But I don’t ever want to see your ass around my boy again, do you understand?”

Dean didn’t turn around to see Lee’s response. He took their momentary distraction as an opportunity to put distance between him and his father, between him and Lee, trying not to vomit as he took off running.  
  


  
  
  
_Now_  
  
  
“You really wanna do this?”

“No, I don’t.”  
  
Gunshots still rang in his ears, as he held the broken pool cue up to his once-friend, but those sounds would fade long before Lee’s words. _I am you_. Blood from a cut over his eye ran down his cheek like falling tears.

The jagged wood slid between Lee’s ribs as Dean looked into his eyes. Lee grunted and gripped his shoulder tight, unwilling or unable to let go.

“I’ll be damned.” His breath became ragged as a trickle of blood seeped out of his mouth. “Why do you care so much, Dean?”

Dean was supporting him now as Lee struggled to stay upright. Dean saw a man who could have been a comrade, a hunting partner for life. Maybe more. Maybe Sam would never have had to leave Stanford, and Lee could have helped Dean find his father. Maybe people who were dead would still be here. Maybe in another life.  
  
“Because someone has to.”

Lee laughed, a dying rattle that made more blood speckle his lips. “Well then...I’m glad it was you.”

He tapped Dean’s shoulder, a tender acceptance of what came next.

Dean pulled the cue out and let Lee’s weight collapse to the floor. The bloody wood followed, suddenly too heavy for Dean to bear. His knees felt like buckling, but he steadied himself against a pool table, looking down at one more fallen friend.


End file.
